The Treasure of Stillness

Island life is now chilly, rainy, and windy. Digging in the garden all day and paddle boarding in the warm sunshine no longer happen. I read that orca whales were recently spotted in the area right outside our living room window where I used to paddle. Were it still summer, I’d be out there in a heartbeat, searching them down in total exhilirated fright. With the water freezing and the surface blown out, I could get swept to Canada at my current skill level. I instead relish the drama the weather has brought from the coziness of our little home in the trees.

Life has gone internal. Rather than doing back dives off a dock until sunset, we’re cuddled up by the fire watching movies at night. Rather than going to plays and community dinners, COVID keeps us snug with our families.

When the kids are at school, fall lifts all of my deep memories to the surface – days when I was a girl, memories of high school, experiences in college, the early years of our family life. Fall has a knack of bringing up past feelings, past choices, past loves, and past losses.

A year ago was the first time both of our kids were in school. The first time I had time to myself in 14 years. When your children are babies, every single ounce of your daily energy and strength is used – to hold, to bounce, to cuddle, to nurse, to feed, to bathe, to endure crying, to assure, to coo, to love. It all starts again when you have another baby. As they grow, energy gradually shifts to exploring the world, talking all day long about how things work, and finding the next big adventure to expand their minds. Then, as months turn to years, they are released to the world. New people fill them with new ideas. Friends broaden their experiences. And one day, a mother is suddenly by herself, sitting at a quiet kitchen table.

Twenty years ago, I stopped working altogether to purposely give myself one year to try to live out my dream job. Unfortunately, loving another person got tangled in that time and I used it up on him rather than working consistently and diligently toward my goal.

Loving love more than anything else is a pattern of mine, really. In college, I fell in love the first quarter of my freshman year and spent the next several years totally immersed in that love. I still graduated with high grades and was involved in great experiences, but everything was secondary to love.

When it comes down to it, I’m still not all that interested in putting anything else before loving the people I love. As I sit here at the table thinking about my 46 years of life, I think of my parents who always had time to be with me. To be asked their stories. To be asked their wisdom. I don’t mean while they busied themselves with other things so they could multitask. I benefitted from the rare gift of an older, retired father and a stay-at-home mother.

When my husband and I had children, I too was given the immense gift of being a stay-at-home mother. Never did I have to split my attention between work and home. Never did our children have to feel put aside. Every single day of their lives, I got to wallow in loving my children to the best of my ability, intellect, and energy. And they got to grow up feeling treasured; whole; filled in the ways humans need to be filled most.

When they both went to school last year, I was given a new gift – me. For 14 years I hadn’t had time to myself, time with my own thoughts, time to process. This culture tries to tell people that time is for busy-fying; for filling; for being overstretched because that’s what other people are doing, even when their finances or life obligations don’t demand it. On the other hand, I think of the famous line in Ecclesiastes – “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens…” There is a time to be busy and a time to be still, and I chose to be in the stillness, knowing its season would give way to something else before I knew it, whether I filled it with what the Joneses were doing or treasured it in my own way. Stillness felt like a sabbatical after all of those years of constant activity.

So I wrote. I poured myself into a full-length book. I went to the library every day, sat in “my” chair with tupperwares of a green smoothie, apple slices, and a sandwich from home, and let my fingers fly over the keyboard of my laptop until I had to stop at 3:10 to get the kids. I loved every minute of it. The book is private for now, but someday I hope to publish it.

Just like that, almost the minute the book’s entirety was poured out, that season ended abruptly. COVID sent all children home, and back I went to giving my life to them. I was so glad I had used the time of stillness for the purpose I had chosen.

Now, both are back at school and another chance at “me time” has surfaced. This second gift of stillness is something I don’t take for granted, knowing full well that schools may shut down before Christmas if people choose to gather for Thanksgiving and COVID gets its chance to circulate throughout our island. I may have a week, I may have the length of a school year. Either way, I’m thankful for any chance I get to think and write. And when everyone comes back home each afternoon, I get the best of both worlds.

To the husbands out there who make it possible for your wives to stay at home with your children, you’re giving them a priceless gift. A mother receives no tangible income from long days of loving, holding, feeding, guiding, teaching, crafting, laundering, and cleaning unless she is paid to do it for someone else. Her life is giving herself fully in return for knowing she did her best. Her gift is love and her reward is love. You’re providing that space in time for her to pass on what is most important every single day, in a way that no one else can do.

Thank you, husband, that you’ve given me a life wholly devoted to loving, to being, and to expressing. I am indebted to you for that gift, and am fully aware of how rare it is.

The painted rock that says “fulfilled” is one of several rocks placed on the ground around town by an unknown painter and uplifter.